Online Annual Report 2013

Welcoming address from the Board of Directors

Dear readers,

the annual review of a research center should list in a clear manner the key indicators, the facts and the figures of the previous performance. Furthermore, it should call attention to special events. Of these, there have been plenty at the HZDR last year, as the beginning and the end were both connected to the dedication of important buildings and infrastructure. Saxony's Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich inaugurated in February 2013 the ELBE- Center for High Power Radiation Sources, the Science Minister of the Free State of Saxony, Prof. Sabine von Schorlemer, opened the extension to the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory in December.

Generous funding for these large-scale research infrastructures was provided by the consortium agreement, which regulated our transition into the Helmholtz Association in 2011. Our special thanks go, thus, to the Free State of Saxony. The federal and the state governments have also decisively contributed to the development of the "National Centre for Radiation Research in Oncology – OncoRay", which we established together with our partners from the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus and the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden. In September 2013, Federal Research Minister Prof. Johanna Wanka put – together with the Saxon Prime Minister – the particle accelerator at the new OncoRay building into operation. The building itself was largely financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). Many thanks to all those responsible for it.

Excellent infrastructure must attract the best international research groups and generate cutting-edge research. Therefore, the first part of our annual report focuses on our research results of the past year. We present as examples five high-ranking published results from our three research areas. They originated, among others, at the "Rossendorf Beamline" at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, at the Dresden High Magnetic Field Laboratory as well as at our Ion Beam Center.

The year 2013 was shaped by the evaluations of the program-oriented funding (POF), the management tool of the Helmholtz Association. During this process our research program "Cancer Research" was assessed outstandingly positive. In addition, a lot of work was concentrated on the preparations for the evaluation of the five other HZDR programs, which were pending for 2014. To anticipate the outcome of the next annual report: Our activities in the research areas of energy and matter as well as our large-scale research infrastructure received very good marks. We would like to say thank you to all involved colleagues and employees for their strong commitment.

We hope you'll enjoy reading our Online Annual Report 2013 on the next couple of pages.